Tag Archives: adults in the room

The Best People

Among the many boasts we’ve become accustomed to hearing from Donald Trump is his repeated insistence that he hires “the best people.” I thought about that boast in the wake the Vice-Presidential choices made by Trump and Harris: JD Vance is one of the most disliked VP candidates of all times, while the selection of Tim Walz has been greeted with widespread enthusiasm.

When it comes to fitness for office, Vance has almost no experience in elective office, while Walz has served in Congress and as Governor of Minnesota. (Even Sarah Palin–to whom he is often compared–had more governing experience than Vance.)

Trump’s choice of an unsuitable running mate is not an aberration. As a recent article in The New Republic put it, the selection confirms that Trump picks the very worst people. The article reminded readers of the many “incompetent and corrupt” members of his administration:

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who resigned after squandering hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on private travel; Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, who resigned “after being embroiled in one ethics controversy after the next,” as CNN put it; Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who “resigned under the weight of more than a dozen federal investigations into his actions,” according to The Washington Post (Zinke is back in Congress, of course, where he is speculating that the recent attempt on Trump’s life was part of a government “plot”); Mike Flynn, the national security adviser who lied to the FBI in the Russia probe and went to jail (Trump pardoned him); swamp thing and Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, who went up the river for tax and bank fraud (Trump pardoned him too); alt-right guru Steve Bannon and trade troll Peter Navarro, who were convicted of contempt of Congress; would-be Batman villain Roger Stone, who was convicted of lying to Congress (Trump commuted his sentence before, ultimately, pardoning him too).

The list went on. And on. And Trump seems incapable of learning from his mistakes. (Of course, he is also incapable of admitting that he makes mistakes..)

Having run the administration with the highest turnover rate in history presumably gave Trump plenty of experience to avoid making the same mistakes, but it’s not like later-term personnel were much better than their predecessors in his own estimation. John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser, was a “dope” who “Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily dumped.” Mark Esper, Trump’s last confirmed defense secretary, was “weak and totally ineffective”; Attorney General Bill Barr, who parted ways with Trump only after belying his claims of widespread 2020 voter fraud and later said that Trump “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office,” was “Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy” (though once Barr endorsed him this year anyway, the magnanimous ex-president retracted the “Lethargic” label).

There is no love lost between Trump and those who entered and left through the revolving door that was his chaotic administration. CNN has identified twenty-four members of that administration who are warning voters against a repeat. Even Mike Pence–sycophant extraordinaire–has refused to endorse him.

His first secretary of defense, James Mattis: “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people – does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us.”

His second secretary of defense, Mark Esper: “I think he’s unfit for office. … He puts himself before country. His actions are all about him and not about the country. And then, of course, I believe he has integrity and character issues as well.”

His chairman of the joint chiefs, retired Gen. Mark Milley …. “We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We take an oath to the Constitution and we take an oath to the idea that is America – and we’re willing to die to protect it.”

 His first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson: “(Trump’s) understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of US history was really limited. It’s really hard to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t even understand the concept for why we’re talking about this.”

His presidential transition vice-chairman, Chris Christie: “Someone who I would argue now is just out for himself.”

His second national security adviser, HR McMaster: “We saw the absence of leadership, really anti-leadership, and what that can do to our country.”

His third national security adviser, John Bolton: “I believe (foreign leaders) think he is a laughing fool.”

There are others quoted, but this sample is representative.

So much for the hope that this buffoon would be restrained by “adults in the room.

The adults have all run for the hills.

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Rats And Sinking Ships

Well, there’s good news and bad news, and it’s the same news.

Daily Kos quotes Politico for the following:

The exodus of top Defense officials under Team Trump continues. In the weeks before Christmas, five senior Pentagon officials resigned their posts for unclear reasons. Now Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s chief of staff, former Army intelligence officer Eric Chewning, has delivered his own resignation.

As the article notes, these multiple departures–especially the most recent one, coming after the Iranian assassination–don’t usually occur during periods in which the nation appears to be gearing up for a military crisis.

Behind the scenes, though, Esper’s office appears to be in turmoil. A Foreign Policy report on Sunday revealed that Trump Defense Secretary Esper had cut senior Pentagon leaders out of the loop on the Suleimani assassination, and that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were not consulted or briefed on the operation ahead of time. “The usual approval process, the decision-making process, did not occur,” an anonymous defense official told FP.

The motivations for these departures are unclear: people may be leaving for reasons ranging from simple frustration with the chaos in Trump’s Defense Department to unwillingness to be part of  an administration that is morally and functionally defective–the latter motive suggesting the old phrase “rats leaving a sinking ship.”

According to Merriam-Webster, that idiom is used in reference to people abandoning an enterprise once it seems likely to fail. The phrase has shown what the reference book calls “great linguistic tenacity,” having been in regular use for over four hundred years. Its persistence is probably attributable to the consistency of the human impulse to “bail out” when a ship–or enterprise–is going down.

In this case, the likelihood that career public servants are departing an administration with which they don’t want to be associated is a sign that a number of career people in the so-called “deep state” have scruples.  The resignations send a message (not that the Trump cabal is capable of receiving or interpreting such messages) that they disagree with the decisions–and the decision-making process– of the current regime. (And what we are discovering about that process is terrifying. An Iran expert formerly with the State Department tweeted out what he is being told by those who remain in the agencies.)

These principled departures are the good news.

The bad news is that the consistent stream of resignations by sane, moral and experienced officials during Trump’s tenure–resignations that have not been limited to the Department of Defense– means that there are even fewer adults left to moderate an unhinged President and counter the assortment of religious zealots and criminals that make up his administration.

According to the Brookings Institution, as of January of 2020, turnover in the administration’s so-called “A Team”–senior positions  just under cabinet secretaries–has been 80%. The Brookings article includes several charts describing the positions and identifying the individuals who left; interestingly, they count each position on the “A Team” only once. So “if multiple people hold and depart from the same position (e.g., communications director), only the initial departure is tracked/affects the turnover rate.”

In other words, turnover has actually exceeded that 80%. (The report also includes a chart showing the serial departures.)

And that turnover is calculated, obviously, for positions that have been filled. As of January 6th, Trump hadn’t even bothered to nominate candidates for 168 of the 741 key administrative positions that require Senate confirmation,

Ask anyone who runs an organization–for-profit, nonprofit or governmental–how constant staff turnover and the attendant loss of institutional memory not only hobbles the organization’s ability to perform, but hinders its ability to recruit competent replacements.

When the people who are left to run the government are ill-equipped to do so–when they are inexperienced, ignorant, delusional or beholden to special interests–all bets are off.

We are in uncharted–and very dangerous–territory.

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